The Dark Tower – Movie Review

The Dark Tower stars Idris Elba as Roland the gunslinger and Matthew McConaughey as the man in black and is a story of a young boy named Jake, play by the young actor Tom Taylor who has dreams and visions of another world in which there’s a war going on and a dark tower that holds the universe together and when Jake discovers a portal to this world and he runs into the gunslinger himself, he starts on an adventure to try to destroy the man in black because Roland is on a revenge path leading straight to him.

This movie is based on the epic series of Stephen King books and quite a bit of them have been mashed into this movie, it’s not really anyone book, it’s an amalgamation of many of them and to some fans dismay and that what we’re going to run into problems.

Whenever you adapt anything whether it’s a book an anime a TV show, a foreign film into a movie for the main stream you’re going to have problems, there’s going to be expectations and a lot of fans are going to be disappointed with how short this movie is.

Idris Elba is one of my favourite actors right now and he is just fine in this role, I never felt anything for Roland as a character, Idris tries his best to make you like Roland but the script doesn’t let him.

The action sequences are fine, there’s some nice stunt work, some of the special effects are fine, it’s nothing mind blowing.

Matthew McConaughey is good as the man in black, he has some fun moments.

One of the standouts was young actor Tom Taylor, I through he had a lot of range, he went from being very reserved to being very angry to having some really emotional scenes.

If I were to point at something that I had a problem with there would be two things I would point at, and they are the script and it’s pacing.

The script not at any point did I feel like a learned much about this world and that is disappointing because this film relies on you having some knowledge of the books, because how they present certain things like the main characters is very surface level, you don’t really get behind them and learn that much about them apart from Jake.

The pacing was another issue, the film is 90 minutes long, but it doesn’t feel like it, this film dragged a lot and only at the end does it actually pick up the pace.

The Dark Tower is a film that feels rushed out which is a really shame with the talent they have attached to it.